VOGONS


First post, by xjas

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I have two drives in my Win7 PC. C: (OS, programs) is 500GB, and D: (some installed software, Steam/GOG libraries, mostly data) is 2TB but I'm barely using 1/10th of it.

I'd like to migrate the data from the 2TB drive onto a smaller one, and then repurpose it as a backup drive. So I'd have:

C: - 500GB (OS/boot)
D: - 500GB or ~1TB
Extra 2TB drive for backups

So what I need is something equivalent to Apple's Time Machine (or Linux's Timeshift), that can mirror both C & D onto the third drive and track changes/deletions/etc. AFAIK Windows doesn't have anything like this built in?

I don't necessarily need seamless 1-click bare-metal restore or anything, I just want a reliable mirror of the files on the disks.

What's a good 3rd party app to do this? What do you guys use?

(Note: before anyone suggests it, I have a maximum of 3 drive bays in the system, so I really do need to mirror the two main drives onto a single third one, which rules out adding two more drives as RAID1 mirrors. Also, I don't want to start changing around the C/D configuration I already have, i.e. by copying all the files onto one drive or re-partitioning. It's taken me a LONG time to get everything installed & set up the way I like.)

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Reply 1 of 2, by derSammler

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Macrium Reflect for example. It creates backup files that you can just mount in Windows to get access to the hard drive(s) at that point of time. You can also freely choose how long and how many backups it should keep. The free version can do all this already.

Another one would be Veeam Agent. That one is much simpler to use and does basically the same thing. It need much more resources, however, as it relys on (and installs) an SQLExpress server and some other stuff you probably don't want.

Reply 2 of 2, by Maeslin

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I've been using AOMEI Backupper for that. Just like Macrium, it's free. I also use it to make rescue images of a few dozen systems, including a few non-Windows-based ones.

It can create a rescue disk that contains the full program, so you can even backup systems you can't install the program to.